Clayton blazes trail with bilingual school

Hood also has enrolled her 5-year-old daughter Kennedy in the Clayton County school's pre-kindergarten program for the coming year so she can learn Spanish. Hood bought Rosetta Stone, the language-teaching software, to keep up with her children.

Dell Perry Giles, the dual-language coordinator, said the 3-year-old school capitalizes on the massive influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants to create a dual-language immersion program in hopes of developing a lifelong benefit of fluency in two languages.

Children tend to learn languages easier, and in this case they have the advantage of speaking both languages all day — rather than simply repeating rote conversations and translating English to Spanish as many foreign language classes do.

The school, which is the first of two bilingual charter schools in Georgia, is not especially well-known. Several parents said they only learned about the school through word of mouth.

So far, only the Hall County school system has decided to follow Clayton's lead.

"I don't know why there isn't more recognition of what we do," Giles said. "We're an English-only state, and we're doing the instruction in Spanish. That tends to raise the hackles of some people."

Giles, who was teaching in the Atlanta school system, said she brought her idea for a bilingual charter school to Clayton after she couldn't find any interest in Atlanta. The school tries for as evenly divided a population between English and Spanish speakers as possible to assist in learning but weights the instruction toward Spanish in kindergarten and first grade. In the older grades — it adds a fourth grade this fall — some classes are taught in English, Giles said.

Clayton — like much of metro Atlanta — has seen a huge influx of Hispanic immigrants. More than 11 percent of the county population is Hispanic compared with 8 percent in the state, and a language other than English is spoken in 15 percent of the homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Hall County, which started its bilingual charter school last year, Hispanics make up 26 percent of the population — with a language other than English spoken in 20 percent of the homes.

"Our demographics have shifted dramatically over the last 10 years," said David Moody, director of elementary schools for Hall County. "One of the major skills students are going to need for the 21st-century global economy is going to be being multilingual. We remain one of the few monolingual countries in the world."

"We have kids who are dreaming in Spanish now — blond hair, blue-eyed kids — who are talking in their sleep in Spanish, which is one of the first signs of bilingualism."

To ensure bilingualism, Unidos elected to build its school one grade at a time. Hall County's World Language Academy at Chestnut Mountain elected to enroll students all the way through the fifth grade, which meant that while it weights instruction toward Spanish in kindergarten and the first grade, the kids in upper grades get most of their instruction in English. The school also ensures that the students get at least one hour of instruction in Mandarin Chinese a week, Moody said.

Students from Spanish-speaking homes are often behind in both Spanish and English when they arrive at school because they aren't learning either language grammatically, Moody said. The charter schools help ensure fluency in both languages, which he said has helped expand the vocabulary of students from English-speaking homes in both languages.

That was a critical point for Alejandro Cruz, who wanted his daughter Angeles to retain the benefit of speaking two languages.

Many of his Hispanic friends were skeptical about sending their kids to Unidos because they thought their kids would learn English more quickly in a public school. Now more are starting to see the benefits of the bilingual education because their kids are forgetting how to speak Spanish.

"She will have more opportunities in the future if she is bilingual — life is getting harder all the time," Cruz said of his 8-year-old. "It is pretty cool to see how the kids absorb both languages so quickly."

Paul Matthews, a professor at the University of Georgia who specializes in educating Latino students, said bilingual programs are better both at educating Hispanic students and integrating them into the larger student body than the typical model in Georgia schools, which teaches Spanish-speaking students separately for part of the day in Spanish and leaves them in English-only classrooms for the rest of the day.

Giles warned, however, that students from both backgrounds typically don't score as well on the state standardized tests during their first couple of years in a bilingual program. "You can't be squeamish about test scores," she told parents of prospective students at an orientation this month. "If it is going to freak you out, then this may not be the best place for your child to enroll. It is a long-term process, and you have to have faith that there will be progress."

Both Giles and Moody, however, said they didn't see the slide during the last round of tests, with first-graders at Unidos scoring above the state average by a few points in English language arts.

Hood, the mother of two Unidos students, said she sees the school as a bright spot in the beleaguered Clayton school system, which lost — and recently regained — its accreditation because of a dysfunctional school board.

She said some friends questioned why she was sending her children to the bilingual school, but now they ask how to enroll their own children.

"I tell them, 'You have to move to Clayton County,' " she said.